A little while ago I decided to investigate using a Bot to fight my Ranked Battles in Splinterlands so that I could free up time and still have my cards available to just focus on the Brawls. Initially I just wanted to get a comparable return on investment to the Rental Market I have been using, but after a bit of poking around I discovered that there were 2 fairly advanced Botting products available so I decided to evaluate them both. This post is a short summary of my evaluation process and findings.
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Both services use a Hive Engine Token that represents a Digital License to use their service and I was able to loan an ARCHMAGE Token while also trying out the Xbot Service by utilizing their free 7 Day Trial. I had 2 playing accounts with a decent set of cards to experiment with – my own @buggedout and also the SGS Community account @ssg-community which I manage. So what I did was set up one account on each botting service and then once they found some equilibrium in the Ranking I switched the services over to see if there was any significant differences in the equilibrium points for each account. Here are the marked up Ratings Charts for both accounts as I made the switch.
Obviously I am dealing with a fairly small sample size and there is likely to be some Noise in these charts, but it was quite obvious to me that there is not a significant difference between the two services in term of their competitiveness in the actual battles. If anything I might put Archmage slightly in front – which was a bit of a surprise to me as it appears to be the cheaper (and older) option.
On the reliability front, there were a few games dropped by both services and Archmage has also recently had an extended outage. It only allows you to play 4 games an hour so it spaces battles out quite a bit whereas Xbot will use up all your stored Energy in the one session if you configure it that way. Both services offer a budget subscription which involves feeding a Rewards Delegation (Both Battle and Focus) to the service in exchange for a subsidized subscription license. Archmage takes 35% and Xbot (Mini) takes 30% and these subscriptions are fairly comparable in terms of the performance, reliability and ongoing costs. Where they differ is in the initial subscription cost. The ARCHMAGE Token can be picked up for around $11-12 USD, while the XBOTMINI Token currently costs around $20 USD.
I did end up buying an XBOTLITE Token (which doesn't require a Rewards Delegation) and I have started experimenting with the Battle Helper product they also offer. In hindsight I probably should have just stuck with Archmage but it’s been fun and interesting to try and benchmark these products. I should also note that both services are currently respecting the Bot Ban in Modern Ranked. I personally am not a fan of playing against Bots, but I can see that they do have some value in generating a return for investors – particularly now that there are Soul Bound cards that can only be acquired by playing your account. For me, I simply don’t have the time to spend all my Energy each day battling in Ranked but I still want to stay in touch with the game and play Brawls.
Has anyone else experimented with both of these services? Is my comparison reasonable or do you have other experiences to share? Please comment below!
I kind of need to play ranked to keep my head in the game for brawls. If make a complete mess of them, otherwise. My brain just doesn't retain enough information these days. 😅
How do the bits work, exactly? Do you have to download something onto your computer or is it online? As in, do you have to have your computer/internet on and running for it to be functioning?
The older bots needed to run somewhere but these are hosted by the service provider. You do need to provide your Posting Key to them so that they can play on your behalf, but otherwise it's pretty easy to set up.
Bots do generate dollar value like you've pointed out, maybe the trial mode begun only in the modern format, so splinterlands can test out the outcome. In order to establish compromise, I feel it should probably stay in wild, so people can get to choose where they want to play.
Now this bots system has been removed it is very good for people playing this game and now it will be known who is working hard the harder they work the better rank they will get. You all will find out who works harder. Before, everyone was just saying that we are not winning because of that..
The service is good for those using the alt account or do not have the time to play. Their may be dip in price after the bit ban in modern format.
Thanks for sharing.
I found your analysis to be very informative, and I appreciate you sharing your findings.
I agree with your assessment that there is not a significant difference between the two services in terms of their competitiveness. Both Archmage and Xbot seem to be very effective at winning battles, and I think the choice of which service to use would come down to personal preference.
I had been using both services over the past year to help me with my time management, much like yourself. I have an XBOTLITE playing my CL GF silver league deck in wild gold 1, I was playing archmageA with my main GF champ deck in wild, and currently archmageA with my RF CL gold deck in wild gold 1.
Archmage got my main to wild champ 1 with 3 days left in the season, so I turned it off and have been playing human modern ever since. I don't really compare the winning % of the two different bots since they play different level cards in the wild gold 1 league. However, based on your thought experiment I could swap them to the other account to see which performs better given the same pool of cards. I think I will try that after a full season with the new modern bot ban.
Thanks for writing this article and sharing your experience.
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I have never used it but it seems that it is a bit sensible or how do you see it?
Nice!
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Bot fighting! That's really great and interesting.
Yay! 🤗
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! help(no space) to get help on Hive. InfoWe've done an in-depth comparison on XBOT vs Archmage performance here:
https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@splinterbank/special-offer-to-archmage-users-or-0percent-fees-for-30-days